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Working Groups

This part of our website is no longer current. Please click here to learn about our current work.

What is a working group?

The Center for Ocean Solutions believes that convening the best minds across multiple disciplines is key to creating solutions. Our working groups bring those minds together to discuss big ocean problems and craft implementable strategies.

Current Working Groups

Social and ecological resilience of small scale fisheries

This interdisciplinary working group of scholars explores the influences of local and global feedbacks on the resilience and adaptive capacity of ecosystems and human communities in small-scale fisheries. The working group aims to better define and understand the biophysical, social, cognitive and governance dimensions of small-scale fisheries, and how to best promote trajectories towards responsible human development and social-ecological well-being. Our ultimate goal is to produce conceptual and operational frameworks. These frameworks will act as tools for informing and supporting shifts away from ecological and social degradation and towards healthy and resilient ecosystems and human communities.

Completed Working Groups

Dynamic ocean management

By identifying where and when resource users can maximize profitability and avoid ecological damage, this approach aims to improve efficiency and selectivity by helping ocean users (e.g., fishers) optimize their effort while balancing resource utilization with conservation

Climate change and top predators

This working group formed to begin addressing the unprecedented threats and uncertainty faced by pelagic ocean predators. A major challenge for developing conservation strategies for large mobile predators such as turtles, tunas, sharks, billfish, and seabirds is that they traverse vast distances and geographic boundaries. By combining and integrating climate change expertise from oceanographers with expertise on pelagic predators from the Tagging of Pacific Pelagics (TOPP) program, this working group sought to bridge a key information gap in how these threatened species are responding to climate change.

Coastal hypoxia in the California Current large marine ecosystem

By comparing and analyzing historical oxygen datasets across multiple ecosystems and leveraging the available knowledge to predict how hypoxic events affect species, communities, and ecosystem processes, we can better account for hypoxic stress in future management strategies.